While at first a distraction, the brick paves the road to an intimate emotional relationship with it. Related to one’s comfort due to repetition (without getting into memory theory), this anomaly affects the passerby enough simply for him or her to remember to walk to the side next time. This situation would most likely occur during a transition space when the typical pedestrian “zones out,” mentally indifferent to and removed from the environment. If he or she hits that same brick, the victim will experience the emotional patina of the space (negative or positive), instantaneously remembering the previous connection with that brick, city block, and Georgetown. Much like a souvenir, the brick as a gateway to a memory is more important than the brick as a building material. Describing an experience with a memorable door handle moving through the transition from outside to in, Sir Norman Foster recollects, “It was not only good to look at; in its own way it was eye-catching. But more important and equally memorable was the way in which it sat in the hand—so comfortable and generous…It made such a deep impression on me.”147 A typically banal encounter with an environment inspired him to write a memoir of the incident. The handle as a piece of metal is meaningless, but the encounter gives it importance. Like Georgetown, the handle possessed enough contrast in relation to one’s typical experience with such an object that it created a sense of comfort that does not negatively distract nor fade into the background with time, instead requiring a familiar action underlain with challenge and awareness. While the typical souvenir is an inexpensive representation of a site visited, these idiosyncratic moments are experiences, rather than objects, lacking any predetermined associations and armed with a sensory-targeted nuance that aims to trigger the memory due to its contrast to the typical architectural experience. It is clear that only the distancing and detaching sense of vision is capable of a nihilistic attitude; it is impossible to think of a nihilistic sense of touch, for instance, because of the unavoidable nearness, intimacy, veracity and identification that the sense of touch carries. Juhani Pallasmaa
4.3b Sensuality:
The manipulation of the transition is illustrated in Carlo Scarpa’s
Querini Stampalia, the restoration and reorganization of an old palazzo in Venice, Italy, on the Rio Santa Maria Formosa canal. It now houses the Fondazione Querini Stampalia, an art museum and library, which includes a bridge and series of transition spaces to a garden behind the building. This project is prominent due to its attention to human-centered detailing, the details’ existence as idiosyncrasies within an existing contextually-everyday building type, and the architect’s ability to tie each moment to the rest of the architecture. Scarpa’s understated architecture is the epitome of
147
Norman Foster, “The Human Touch,” Foster + Partners, 1.
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